Saturday, April 28, 2012

- You started smiling earlier this month. Usually when I'm singing a silly song, but also when I engage in your 'babble'. Which brings me to...

- You coo and "talk". You make the cutest little baby sounds and are delighted (see "smiling", above) when I answer your sounds in 'conversation'.

- Your naps and schedule have solidified and have remained consistent this month: you are very awake and alert in the morning, then you have a nice long nap in the afternoon right after lunch, and then you're awake a lot in the evening because...

- The evening is your fussy time. You take a quick catnap in the late afternoon and then are awake (and not too happy about it) the rest of the evening. This can make dinner prep rather difficult, but usually you're happy to be my sous-chef in the Ergo.

- You weigh 12 lbs and you're still in 0-3 month size clothes.

- Your cries have changed from last month. They have more character and definition now, so I can tell your "Feed-me-right-now!" cry from your Noises of General Complaint. When I come to the crib to answer your Complaining Cry, you're all smiles and happy to see me. Sometimes you'll even stop your Feed-me-right-now! cry and change into a Complaining Cry when you see me. It's so sweet.

- Your limit of awake time is still about 1 hour, though in the evening you are awake a bit longer because of your fussiness.

- You are still a very good daytime sleeper. I swaddle you and lay you down and you go right out.

- You've been (begrudgingly) doing some tummy time. I'll prop you up on the Boppy pillow, but your limit is about 5 minutes before you start your Complaining Cry.

- We recently started napping you at least once a day in your little PeaPod tent to get you used to it. You weren't a big fan for the first day, but now you seem to feel at home in it because you go right out, just like in your crib.- Just this past week you started to sleep through the night. For the past five days you've been sleeping from 7pm until 7am, with a dream feed right before I go to bed, around 9:30 pm. (A 'dream feed' is where you simply pick baby up while still asleep and nurse or give a bottle. It fills up their tummy and keeps them satisfied for a longer period at night. We did this with each of our boys and it was wonderful!) For the first two nights I gave you some 'encouragement' with sleeping through the night - you would start stirring and breaking your swaddle between 5-6am, but I re-wrapped you, gave you a pacifier and you went back to sleep until 7/7:30. For the past two nights you've slept straight through without waking up!

Your foster brothers continue to adore you. Tommy loves to hold you and feed you, and almost every day he asks, "Can't we keep her forever, mom?" It's safe to say you are loved very much, Baby B! We can't wait to see how you change and grow in the next month!

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Mark used to work from home every day for almost seven years. When we had kids, he was able to pop out of his office now and then to see what they were up to: to see their art projects, a story they just made up, or a cool building they made. Now that Mark works outside the home, he misses an awful lot of the fun stuff going on at home. So I use my phone to send him photos throughout the day of what the kids and I are up to. He loves receiving random photo texts when he's at work because it makes him feel more connected to what's going on with us. Here's a sampling of the last few weeks of "Daddy Photos":

Feeding Baby B

Tommy working on his reading lesson, Ben working on writing his numbers. Don't be fooled by the tranquility of this scene; it only lasted for about five more minutes before both kids decided they'd had enough of it and wandered outside to find bugs.

Somewhere in San Jose. On Tuesday afternoons we drop Baby B off at the Social Services building for her visitation with her mom, and then explore the park across the street. The kids had fun playing hide-and-seek in this statue.

This is one of the many things that occurs when you give children free access to scissors, tape, and string: they make beards for themselves. Among many other things.

"Shirts" made out of shopping bags. At first, the boys were using the shopping bags to sack race each other around the house. But when their legs popped through the bottoms, they decided to use them as shirts.

A lizard that Tommy caught and wanted to save until Dad came home to see it. He named it John. He asked me to find out what lizards eat. My best guess based on a quick Google search was that they eat bugs, so we spent a lot of time digging up roly-polies to feed to John. He didn't touch them.

If you know our youngest, you wouldn't be surprised at this one. But a word of explanation: while playing hide-and-seek with the boys one afternoon, I thought would be funny to climb the tree when it was my turn to hide. The boys thought it was so cool that I got up there, and they begged me to help them climb the tree. Being the cool boy mom that I am, I obliged. And then sent a picture of it to their father.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

At the end of 2011 I posted a To Do List for myself. I made my list public in hopes that it would keep me accountable, and of course, help me remember my year-long goals. So here's how I'm doing so far:

1. Run a 10K - Check. I actually completed this somewhat by accident and with no planning on my part. I was originally scheduled to run a 5K with a friend in early March. My friend wasn't able to get a spot in the 5K, but she found out that there were plenty of spots open in the 10K (to be clear, a 5K = 3.1 miles, a 10K = 6.2 miles eek!).There was no way I'd be able to run a 10K, but I reasoned that I'd rather walk most of a 10K than run alone in a 5K. So we both signed up for the 10K. We figured we'd run a bit and then walk the rest of the way. To our surprise, we actually ran most of the way. Which was shocking to me because I had not been able to train very much since we'd had a 3 month old just a few weeks before and currently had a one-week old - doesn't leave much time or energy for training! I'm going to count this one as my 10K for the year. I haven't run since that race, and don't see myself having much time for running anytime in the near future.

2. Spend at least 10 minutes one-on-one time with each of my kids every day. Pending.It is no easy task getting these boys away from each other! They have the same sleep schedules and otherwise play together all day. Occasionally one will sleep in while the other one is awake, and when that happens I'll purpose to spend time with them; we may read a book or we'll make breakfast and chat together. I saw one idea that I'm going to try to implement, which is to have one day a week for each child where they get to stay up past bedtime for 15 minutes. I'm thinking that's the only time I can make sure to get them alone with me!

3. Commit to eating only real food. Fail.I just looked back at what I wrote for my plan to cut out all processed food and sweeteners and I had to laugh at myself. These days, I'm lucky if I get something, anything, on the table each night. I have been trying to get a lot more veggies into our diets, especially after watching Forks Over Knives. But "quick" usually wins over "real". We'll tackle the switch to real food some other time.

4. Read the whole Bible again. Pending...possiblefail.Having a newborn is really hard. I don't know how anyone who has a newborn finds time to read anything, let alone have a quiet time. So I've been taking short-cuts on my Bible reading. My reading plan wants me to read a few chapters from an Old Testament book (like Deuteronomy), one Psalm, a few paragraphs of a gospel (like Matthew), and a chapter of one of the letters (like James). Normally all of this takes about 20 minutes of reading. Now, instead of reading all the passages assigned for the day, I've been reading just a few paragraphs of a gospel and a Psalm, since I find those the most encouraging for the short amount of time that I have before someone starts crying or fighting. If I have more time, I'll read from one of my favorite books, like Philippians or Ephesians, even though they're not part of the plan. What I need most these days is comfort and encouragement. I'm probably not going to get through the Bible this year, and that's okay.